by Darren Greer
“That’s your decision.” Anne says, ever the social worker.
“I could try and get the money anyway. I could cite a work emergency. Or I could just take the money she left me personally and donate that. There are no conditions on it at least. It would be enough, wouldn’t it?”
“Three hundred thousand does not compare to three million,” Anne says flatly, now the administrator.
I don’t quite have the guts to make this decision on my own. If Anne were to say the word, I would make the arrangements right then. I need, I tell her, to sit by Randy’s bedside and atone for missing his pain. I don’t want to be in Advocate anymore. I want to be home, where I belong, in Toronto, doing the work I was meant to do.
“You mean,” says Anne, “you’d consider skipping your own grandmother’s funeral, and leaving behind all that money, which we can desperately use, for the sake of seeing a client?”
“A client who is in the hospital. A client who almost died because I was negligent.”
“He didn’t almost die because of you. He almost died because he swallowed a lot of pills.”
“Same difference,” I say.
Anne says nothing. But just when I think she has hung up, her voice comes back. “Jake. I hate to say this to you now, but if you were to do that you should consider yourself dismissed from this agency.”
“Pardon?” I can hardly believe what I am hearing.
“I’m serious,” says Anne. “Randy is your client. I realize this must be difficult for you. But this is your grandmother, Jake. Even if you do go to the funeral, you still might not keep your job here. You are not the most effective counsellor on staff precisely because you can maintain no personal distance from the clients. Randy is a case in point. You have little social interaction outside of your work. You have no balance. There has been talk of letting you go before.”
I am incredulous. “So you’re saying that if I don’t stay I lose my job? And if I do, I lose my job anyway?”
“No,” says Anne. “If you give the eulogy, which is what this is about more than the money, you keep your job. But if you come back to it, after having done what you need to do, you need to work with an outside counsellor about issues in your own life. If you do that, and develop some perspective, your employment here will be fine.”
“Thanks loads,” I say.
“Those are the facts,” says Anne. “We can take care of Randy. Stay and do what needs to be done.”
I hang up. I don’t want to hear any more. I stay in my room, depressed. The funeral is eighteen hours away. The grandfather clock downstairs, even after all these years, continues to tick inexorably away.
3
by the time October arrived, my mother and Jeanette were still refusing to admit that their brother was as seriously ill as he was. They maintained some hope that David would rally and recover. But he was so weak, Dr. Fred wanted him to have a nurse’s care. The problem was, no one from the local Victorian Order of Nurses would come to the house. “I’m going to arrange something from the city,” Dr. Fred said. “Give me a day or two.”
My grandmother did not want a nurse hovering in her house at all hours. “Especially a foreign one who doesn’t live in Advocate. I’ve got some very nice things here,” she said. “I would like to keep them.”
Jeanette and my mother pointed out the unlikelihood a von would moonlight as a burglar. In the end, they didn’t have to worry. To find a public nurse willing to work with my uncle, even from Halifax, was rare enough. To find one also willing to travel that distance was impossible. The only alternative was a private nurse.
“Who’s got the money for that?” cried my grandmother.
Jeanette and my mother quickly pointed out that she did.
“You kids think I’m made of money,” she said. “You always have. But I’m not. I’m just as beholden as anyone else.”
My mother worked on Grandnan to fulfill Dr. Fred’s request. He, on several occasions, took me aside and asked if I had told my mother that Deanny and I had been to see him.
“No,” I told him.
“I think you should. She may be able to answer some questions I can’t. And you’ll never get those answers until you ask them.”
But I had answers enough. I sensed rather than understood Dr. Fred disapproved of what was going on in our house. The conflict between my grandmother and her daughters. The refusal to discuss the problem. He waded in on the argument about the nurse. In his opinion my uncle was beyond the point of being cared for by his sisters alone. He needed a professional.
“What he needs,” said Jeanette, “is to be in a hospital.”
“I agree,” said Fred. “But they will send him home.”
“What if you admitted him?” asked my mother.
“The administrators and other doctors overrule me. I could report them to the board or the province, but that takes time. And in this situation time is a precious commodity.”
Faced with no choice, my grandmother agreed to pay for a private nurse — on condition she be allowed to interview her, to rule out thieves and wantons. My mother and Jeanette agreed. There were no private nurses in Advocate so Dr. Fred arranged for an interview with one from Halifax. Her name was Cassandra. She took one look at my uncle after she was hired and clucked her tongue. “He’s in rough shape,” she told my mother. “I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never seen it.”
“You’re not afraid of him?” my mother asked.
“Why should I be afraid?” Cassandra said. “It’s just an illness, honey. They come and go. No different from dealing with someone with tb, or syphilis.”
Cassandra was older than my mother. More matronly. She had no time for Grandnan, even though she technically employed her. She knew what my grandmother thought of what was happening to my uncle. This did not matter to her; my uncle was sick and she took care of him, calling him “honey” and bathing him, cleaning his feet and hands. She did her best to make him comfortable. My mother and Jeanette appreciated her. My grandmother stayed out of her way; she tended to stay in her room when Cassandra was working. The rest of us looked forward to her visits, for, like Deanny, she brought an outsider’s perspective into the house, an uninfected energy.
When Cassandra wasn’t there, my mother and Jeanette cared for him. They begged my grandmother to sit with him occasionally, if only to give them a break. She refused. “He’s fine,” she said. “Someone’s always in the next room, so what do I need to be there for?”
This kind of denial was frustrating to my mother, and she told my grandmother she was being a coward.
“I’m busy,” my grandmother said. “I’ll stay in the house with him, but I’m not going to sit in his room holding his hand.” This was a figure of speech. My grandmother would no more hold my uncle’s hand than sit in a hot fire.
Eventually my mother and Jeanette employed Deanny and me to sit with him when she and my aunt took breaks. We were ordered to stay by the door and not go near the bed. Deanny didn’t mind; she had already been holding David’s hand and she was not afraid of him now.
I no longer touched him, after that one time I held his hand. Not so much from fear of contagion. I had examples in Jeanette, my mother, Cassandra, and Deanny that this was no longer to be worried about. But I still could not shake the feeling one day I might end up like him. It horrified me. I was also stricken with pity for my uncle; even this had an effect upon me. To this day I do not know which was more damaging — the fear or the compassion.
▪ ▪ ▪
i had little with which to fill my days. Deanny was in school and I was not. My uncle was in no condition to be giving me lessons anymore. To care for him, my mother and Jeanette had entirely given up on home-schooling me. My grandmother said I would turn into an uneducated savage and fall so hopelessly behind the other students I would never catch up.
“What do you expect us to do about it?” said my mother. “Lay siege to the school? They won’t let him in. I can’t help it, can I?”
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br /> “Well, someone’s got to take responsibility for the boy,” my grandmother said. “A child left to his own devices is a recipe for trouble and corruption. You don’t mind if I take him in hand, do you?”
“What do you mean,” asked my mother suspiciously, “by ‘take him in hand’?”
“Educate him!” cried my grandmother. “Give him his lessons!”
My mother agreed, if only to get my grandmother out of her hair. But if my mother and Jeanette were too long out of school to be of much use to me, my grandmother was doubly so. It had been forty-five years since she had stepped into a classroom. I was as suspicious as my mother as to what my grandmother’s lessons would consist of, and my suspicions were confirmed the first morning we met in the kitchen. She took one look at the stack of books I carried and said I wouldn’t need them.
“What are we going to be learning about then?” I asked.
“History!” said my grandmother. “Geography. Music and theology. There are some things, Jacob, that cannot be learned from those books.”
When I sat down at the table she told me to take a pad of paper and a pen and take notes.
“This might be useful someday,” she said.
It was useful, if only as an example of how to twist history. My grandmother gave me a full account of the founding and settlement of Advocate, drawn from a life filled with gossip and the church’s teachings. She did not mince words. Into them she poured all her bias and vitriol. She never mentioned the removal of the First Nations people from their lands, and their relegation to the reserve. She exalted the Lemon Day parade, and made particular reference to an edict from the first Nova Scotia assembly in 1792 that banished all Catholic priests on pain of death. Eventually her history dissolved into the naming of personages and families, with the McNeils chief amongst them. She traced the ancestry of my grandfather directly back to the Catholic side’s founder, Nathan McNeil. She kept me there almost two hours until my mother came out and asked me how it was going.
“He’s a quick study,” retorted my grandmother. “He’ll go far.”
In fact I had said nothing during the lesson, and after the first few minutes barely took a note. My grandmother seemed less interested in teaching than expounding. After the first half hour I doubted whether it would have mattered whether I was there or not.
Looking at an empty notebook, my mother said, “That’s enough for today.”
“I’ve barely started,” objected my grandmother.
“Until tomorrow,” said my mother. “Jacob, run upstairs and see if your Aunt Jeanette will drive me to the post office.”
“Same time same place,” said my grandmother to me. “Don’t you be a minute late.”
I hadn’t known until that day a formal educator lay so shallowly beneath my grandmother’s bosom. She trapped me for a few hours each morning to espouse more history — a detailed description of the inner workings of the Catholic Church, and a brief history of Thomas Aquinas, whom she had never read but knew second-hand from my dead grandfather. I cannot think of any subjects that would torture a twelve-year-old boy more. For my grandmother this was a way to distract herself. By way of teaching me, she could immerse herself in the past, when sons did not die of mysterious diseases upstairs and neighbours and friends did not turn their faces away from what had once been one of the most respected families in town. She wanted to teach me history because history was all she had left.
4
throughout october, my uncle’s health continued to deteriorate, and we — my mother and Jeanette, myself and Deanny — spent more and more time in his room. There were two more hospital visits, and again he was given minimal care and shipped home. In the second week of October, Cassandra told Dr. Fred two days a week were not enough, and that in her opinion David should be moved to a hospital for around-the-clock care. Fred had been dreading this day.
“At this rate,” Cassandra said, “he’s going to go into cardiac arrest.”
Dr. Fred knew Cassandra was right. But he also knew the hospital wouldn’t take David. Fear of contagion had not abated there. Rooms were scrubbed, Hazmat suits worn, and sheets and towels burned. Nurse Jones would do for my uncle what she could when she was on duty, but none of the other nurses would. Even the doctors balked. Dr. Fred explained this to Cassandra.
“What of their Hippocratic oath?” Cassandra said.
“It’s a small town,” sighed Dr. Fred.
“If it was me,” said Cassandra, “I’d march in there and make some heads roll.”
But Cassandra was from the city. She was enlightened, and a consummate nurse. She understood the fear of contagion, but she couldn’t condone it in the medically trained. She suggested my uncle be transferred to Halifax, where he would be cared for by more experienced and seasoned professionals. She told Dr. Fred she was surprised he had not thought of this himself.
“I did,” said Dr. Fred. “But it won’t make a difference now. His sisters want him close. They don’t want him to die by himself.”
“Do they want him alive as long as possible?” said Cassandra. “Or do they want him to die tomorrow?”
Dr. Fred discussed the choices with my mother and Jeanette.
They decided to wait for a lucid moment, when they would ask my uncle what he wanted. Dr. Fred insisted he be there as well, to explain the medical considerations, so David could make an informed choice. When that day came, David was groggy from the medications, but lucid enough. Dr. Fred checked him over, changed his iv as my mother and aunt stood looking on. I slipped into the room to hear the conversation. Deanny was in school.
“David,” Dr. Fred said. “There’s something we want to discuss with you.”
And he laid it out on the table. He told David if he didn’t go to Halifax his life expectancy could be shortened. He needed care that couldn’t be provided at home.
“What kind of care?” croaked Uncle David.
“A morphine drip, for one,” said Dr. Fred. “To keep you out of pain. I’m hesitant to give you one in home care environment, and I think we can both agree that the pills and injections we’re giving you are no longer sufficient.”
As if to prove Dr. Fred right, Uncle David winced. I was unsure of where his pain came from. When it subsided he said, “What else?”
“Antibiotics,” he said. “The local hospital doesn’t have the necessary compliment on hand. If you’re admitted to the hospital in Halifax, they will have everything — and the doctors there can try things I haven’t.”
“Will they save my life?”
Dr. Fred didn’t answer immediately. He looked at my mother.
“They will prolong it.”
“By how much?”
“I think you know the answer to that.”
“Months?”
“Possibly,” said Dr. Fred.
“More likely,” said Uncle David, “days.”
“Most likely,” said Dr. Fred.
“If it’s a matter of days, I stay here.”
He drifted back to sleep.
Dr. Fred turned to my aunt and mother. “That’s it, then. Keep giving him the pills, and I’ll keep up with the iv antibiotics. Someone must be with him at all times now.”
“Thank you, Fred,” said my mother.
“I wish there was more I could do.”
“You’ve done plenty,” said Jeanette. “You’ve done more than anyone else in this damn town.”
As if on cue, we heard my grandmother whistling from the kitchen below.
“I better get going,” said Fred. “Call if you need me.”
▪ ▪ ▪
it was around that time something very strange happened to uncle’s mouth. Houseflies began to gather about it. Since my uncle was mostly asleep, or groggy when awake, he did not notice. But my mother did. Sometimes there would be seven or eight of them crawling in and out of his mouth and nose. My mother would shoo them away.
“It could be the thrush,” Dr. Fred said, “though I doubt it. They must
smell something. It could be because his stomach lining is deteriorating and they smell the carrion.”
“It’s disgusting,” said Jeanette. “Isn’t there something we can do?”
Dr. Fred could think of nothing, short of sitting beside his bed and waving them away. Although we were not forbidden from his room, my mother no longer asked Deanny and me to pull watch. She and Jeanette wished to do it, I think because they were afraid he might die and they wanted to be with him. My grandmother kept a fold-up cot in the upstairs hallway closet; they rolled it into his room and made it up, each of them taking turns on it.
My grandmother was incensed when she found out they passed on a chance to move my uncle to Halifax. “You’ve doomed the man!” she said. “He won’t last the week!”
“Spare us the outrage, Mother,” my mother said. “This is not about you.”
My grandmother said no more. The news that David would stay home to die made it harder for her to keep up her senseless prattle. She stopped baking. She spent most of her time in her bedroom, on the phone. I didn’t feel sorry for my grandmother during this time. David was imprisoned by circumstance. My grandmother by choice.
Only once, when I was just coming out of his room, did she corner me in the hallway and ask anxiously how he was. I was surprised, I admit.
“He’s sleeping. He always sleeps now.”
“Dear God in heaven,” said my grandmother. “How did we ever get into this fix?”
“What fix?” I said innocently.